All pho­tographs are by Mark Hurvitz unless they are obvi­ously not (or credit oth­er­wise is given).

The pho­tos in the ban­ner at the top (only a shal­low sliver of a much larger photo) are either from our home or our trav­els and are offered for their beauty alone (though a brain-teaser for me: “Where was that?”).

When some­one pro­duces the same lapel but­ton for com­pet­ing can­di­dates, all that indi­vid­ual is inter­ested in is the dol­lar. So encour­ag­ing us to [have?] faith in either can­di­date from the 2008 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion is very odd.

Is faith some­thing you can have in some­one? We say: “I have faith in you.”

We each need to learn dif­fer­ent things at dif­fer­ent stages of our lives.

Pharaoh was unwill­ing to release his labor supply.

Pharaoh thought him­self a god. He believed he could do what­ever he wanted to with indi­vid­u­als or entire peo­ples. He needed to learn the dif­fi­cult les­son: there exists a Source of Power beyond the self.

Amaz­ingly, in our own day we have already for­got­ten that “Hun­dreds of thou­sands of… refugees streamed home­ward…” [Rwan­dan refugees; James C. McKin­ley Jr. of The New York Times in the Los Ange­les Daily News. Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 16, 1996.] Refugees all over the world seek shel­ter and comfort.

As the north­ern hemi­sphere moves deeper into win­ter with less light for each day, our morn­ings begin near dawn. This is a beau­ti­ful time of begin­nings and promise. While the sounds we hear each morn­ing are not those of birds chirp­ing and chil­dren learn­ing, but the clank­ing of men at work, even these call out […]

I know that Emer­son said: “A fool­ish con­sis­tency is the hob­gob­lin of lit­tle minds, adored by lit­tle states­men and philoso­phers and divines.” But, I don’t this is an issue of fool­ish con­sis­tency. I’d like some­one to explain if they feel differently.

Actu­ally, every­where in the world our future is deter­mined by the actions at each of the moments we live them. Nonethe­less, tonight (Sep­tem­ber 3, 2011) after Shab­bat in Israel: ה אלול תשע”א, peo­ple all over the coun­try are expected […]

Yes, that’s a “trade­mark” sym­bol there. Why not? I con­tinue to tell peo­ple that I came to the rab­binate out of “polity” not “piety”. My involve­ment was as a com­mu­nity orga­nizer. A quick check on Google indi­cates that I’m nearly the only per­son to have used it… and, at that, sig­nif­i­cantly more frequently.

Ready for רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה‎

I began cre­at­ing a Web site in my head as early as August 1995 when I drafted the following

For a project I’m pur­su­ing regard­ing Jew­ish involve­ment on the inter­net and the World Wide Web in par­tic­u­lar, I’m inter­ested in learn­ing about any sites about which you may know. For exam­ple, do any rab­bis have Home pages? Which syn­a­gogues or syn­a­gogue orga­ni­za­tions have Web sites? Does Marge Piercy have a site at which you can read por­tions of “He She and It”? Does Howard Rhein­gold have a site where you can learn more about cre­at­ing a Vir­tual [Jew­ish] Com­mu­nity? Is there a Web Cam­era at the Kotel? In the Wilder­ness of Zin?

categories

¡warning!

This site remains under con­sid­er­able reconstruction.

Most pages should still be avail­able in their orig­i­nal loca­tion. How­ever, I will be mov­ing the vast major­ity of the old site (sta­tic html pages) into the Web 2.0 (blog) site. If you expe­ri­ence any “link rot”, please let me know.

When I ini­tially cre­ated this site I orga­nized the mate­r­ial into what seemed to be mean­ing­ful cat­e­gories (in the days before “tags”). But the time came when, it was hard to fig­ure out which link to click if you wanted to know about Sammy Levinger’s (“who”?) death (“what”?) while fight­ing dur­ing the Span­ish Civil War (“when”?), though we had vis­ited Bel­chite the site (“where?”) of the bat­tle where he sus­tained his mor­tal wounds. The new tools should make this process easier.